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Open Source: Mageia 2 (Cauldron) Looking Good

If you have not been following the saga of the Mageia Linux distribution then you are unaware that Mageia 2 is slated to be released on May 15th. At this point the distribution is in Beta 3 testing and then will have a Release Candidate out right around May 2nd.

Since I am a business user of Mageia, I decided to assist with the testing for the new release to help uncover any bugs still hanging around in the distribution. At least for any of the software that I use. As there are no CD / DVD images out for Beta 3 yet, I decided to take our VirtualBox Mageia test install up to the Mageia Cauldron (development version) release from which the new Mageia 2 will be created. I usually do all upgrades from the command line using these commands below, so the lack of CD / DVD media for Beta 3 is not a problem for me:

Before beginning the upgrade, but after selecting the new media source, I started the Mageia Control Center (MCC) and selected the “non-free” and “tainted” media sources that are not enabled by default. Otherwise I would have not had a complete upgrade as I have chosen some packages to install from both of those on our test install.

In my not so humble opinion, the Mageia Control Center is still one of the defining features of Mageia. The new release keeps the GUI MCC and the command line mcc for the times that the GUI may not be available.

During the upgrade process I was given a choice to keep using “legacy” System V initialization or switch to systemd initialization. This is a nice touch. Since almost all modern Linux distributions derived from Red Hat will be moving to systemd, I went ahead and selected that during the upgrade. I wanted to see if the upgrade would smoothly handle the switch from System V to systemd. I am glad to report that it appears to have handled that very well. As you can see in this short video the OS boots very fast with systemd.

I think I am becoming a systemd convert. The OS is also very responsive in this virtual machine. I look forward to seeing how it does on the “bare metal” after I upgrade our systems here. The bottom line is, it seems at this time that the Mageia 2 release will be well done and a contender for the end-user desktop.

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Gene A.

Gene is a "Unix Guy", network technologist, system trouble-shooter and IT generalist with over 20 years experience in the SOHO and SMB markets. He is familiar with and conversant in eComStation (a.k.a. OS/2), DOS (PC, MS and Free), Unix, Linux and those GUI based systems from Microsoft. Gene is also a follower of Jesus (forgiven, not perfect), and this does inform his world view.
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